


linear progression

by liminal



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Reflection, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-19 00:01:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1447867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminal/pseuds/liminal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins?” (Kenneth Koch)</p><p>If they aren’t at the end of the line, he wants to know where the line starts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	linear progression

**Author's Note:**

> yoo so big spoilers for cap 2! specifically the second post credits scene (which i think you can find on youtube if you missed it in the cinema)

It’s the fall that triggers something in the Soldier’s mind, a memory of a different fall, in a different time and place; a memory in which a different man plummeted towards the ground.

_A train. A goddamn fast moving train. Something about Coney Island. Snow and guns that fired blue stuff instead of bullets._

_“I had him on the ropes.”_

_Fresh, crisp air, the kind you suck in when you’re high up a mountain range, and you're millimetres away from tumbling over the edge into godknowswhat._

_Two hands reaching out, knowing the other is safety. Desperate, tragic, comic._

_And then gravity sets in, and the fall seems to last for an eternity._

_And the cold_

_hard_

_ground._

Whether those images are real or not, the sense of loss emanating from them is overwhelming. So the Soldier defies orders again, defies rationality and reason, and follows Captain America.

_“Are you ready to follow 'Captain America' into the jaws of death?"_

_"Hell, no. That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight, I'm following him."_

Something about the end of the line.

He hits the water, almost warm in comparison to the cryo, and thinks they’re not at the end yet.

-

It’s as much as he can do to pull the body out of the water and silence the doubts that never used to plague him as to whether the costume covers a man or a cadaver.

He’s done too much and gone too far: the most the Soldier can do is check that the Captain is still breathing before he flees the man who, for whatever reason, makes him both less and more than what he is. Less of an anomaly, more human. 

There was a certainty in cryostasis and kill missions and handlers in black SUVs. The man who calls him Bucky is a new shade of a grey in a world that was comfortably black and white. The man who calls him a friend is corrosive for a man made of metal.

The Soldier flees the complication, flees the certainty of a pickup and mission reports, and heads towards the centre of town, keeping to the shadows and peripheries as muscle memory dictates.

If they aren’t at the end of the line, he wants to know where the line starts.

-

The Soldier knows this modern world, has seen it grow throughout the decades when he was pulled from the cold and set loose under orders for a few days. He has seen skyscrapers rise and suburbs recede, seen cars get sleeker and cheaper until the roads are filled with them. Knows it, has seen it, doesn’t fully understand it; isn''t really a part of it.

What he does understand, though, is security. That no one is safe, no one is free, that freedom could only come from HYDRA. The Soldier understands that security cameras mounted on the corner of every building mean he is watched and that a metal arm is a hindrance. His weapon, his greatest strength, the most valuable part of him has become his greatest liability.

Three names run through his mind as he walks into the provincial shopping centre, brightly lit and impersonal. As he ducks into the first clothing store and emerges twenty minutes later in a uniform of greys and browns and blues, a cap pulled on to cover his shaggy hair and his metal hand tucked inside a pocket, and the unconscious shop assistant’s wallet in his pocket. As he heads towards the nearest information point.

1\. Captain America.

2\. “Bucky?”

3\. “Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

-

Every metallic surface in the store is shiny and smooth to the touch, but the Soldier knows he could warp everything beyond recognition or repair with the slightest flick of his wrist. Artificial, like everything else in this world. It all lacks substance.

But his right hand stays in his pocket and the left slowly gets to grips with the keyboard in front of him. 

A voice chimes from behind him. 

“Oh, you’re back! Can I help you with something?”

The Soldier turns around slowly and sees the long-haired man in a corporate shirt recoil.

“My bad,” he stutters and the Soldier notes the spark of recognition in the man’s eyes fade into embarrassment, “I thought you were someone else. Is there anything I can do for you?”

The Soldier switches his gaze back to the screen and the man shuffles away quickly. He enters what little information he has and watches as a whole world opens up before him. He reads and scrolls and his fevered eyes are enough to keep anyone else from asking him to share the laptop. 

He sees the long-haired man disappear into a room behind the desk and re-emerge with a boxed laptop for a customer, talking incessantly about utility and travel and data space.

When closing time is announced and the storeroom door doesn’t properly after the assistant, the Soldier slips in quietly behind him and reappears two minutes later, a clean white box under one arm and another unconscious man in his wake. Once again he's acted irrationally and, for the first time in decades, he's being driven by gut feelings, as well as the realisation that if HYDRA had taught him anything, it was the value of knowledge.

The security guard who questions why the metal detectors go haywire when the Soldier passes through them isn’t given a second chance to rephrase his enquiry.

-

It’s too late to head to Brooklyn or the museum, so the Soldier heads for a hotel and uses the stolen wallet to book a room.

“For how many nights,” the receptionist asks, and all the Soldier can do is shrug. Time is irrelevant when a mission is incomplete.

He assumes the bed is comfortable and the shower warm, but the Soldier is not a soft man. He is accustomed to metallic chairs and being sluiced down with ice-cold water if a handler feels inclined to make the effort. He sets the laptop up, sits at the desk and reads everything he can until the headache and visions overwhelm him, and he slumps down in the wooden-backed chair, far more at ease there than resting on downy pillows.

He wakes naturally, for the first time in as long as he can remember, and sees the sun bursting through the blinds.

And then he goes to confront his fate.

-

He stays in the museum for hours and thinks that, even if the world he knows is ablaze all around him, it’s still better than the cold.

Words and thoughts and decades crash and burn around him as he reads about bullies and Brooklyn, serums and super-soldiers, HYDRA bases and elite stealth teams and- 

Sees that face. His face. A face that looks like his, to be correct. To think that they are the same men is absurd. 

And he doesn't know if he’s remembering what it was like to hang from the door of a train carriage before plummeting hundreds of feet into open air, or if it’s the bottom of his known world that’s finally fallen away, but he (whoever 'he' is - the Winter Soldier? Sergeant Barnes? Bucky?) is left feeling something he hasn’t felt in aeons. Human. Vulnerable. Penetrable and weak and at risk. 

He turns around, leaves, doesn’t look back.

Doesn’t see a man with golden hair watching from the shadows he used to inhabit.

That line has ended.


End file.
